Estimating the Losses

Moreover, in the Ukrainian folk and historical tradition the juxtaposition of the two worlds was clear. The Cossack-Tatar conflict occupied a prom­inent place in that rich heritage, which explicitly described the Tatar raids and evoked the “Lament of the Poor Slaves in Turkish Captivity,” to name a classic example.

These songs were deeply moving. Thus when in the 1880s the Ukrainian- born Russian painter Ilya Repin heard the “Lament of the Poor Slaves in Turkish Captivity” played by such musicians, he “cried more than a single tear,” and he later incorporated this supposed Christian-Muslim conflict into his great painting of the Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Satirical Let­ter to the Turkish Sultan. This enormously popular painting (see chapter 9, below) continues to influence Ukrainian and Russian, that is, “East Slavic,” sensibilities to the present day.¹¹ Indeed, Christian-Muslim conflict and the ostensible horrors of Tatar captivity seemed to know no limits in the folk tradition and entered Polish as well as Ukrainian folklore. So, according to one such folktale recorded in Poland rather recently, captured Christians were kept in cages and fed with milk and nuts. When they were so fat that they could not walk, they were roasted and eaten by the savage Tatars.¹²

For many years, certain pioneering historians (considered rather so­phisticated in their own time) seem to have exaggerated the scale of Tatar raiding almost as much as did simple peasants. Thus the distinguished pioneer of modern Polish historiography, Adam Naruszewicz (1733-1796), is said to have stated that Poland-Lithuania lost to Tatar raids in total “anywhere from ten to twenty million inhabitants” (kilkanascie miljonow mieszkancow).

Both the Ukrainian and Polish folk traditions and eastern European historians of this issue have seldom been questioned by modern historians. Indeed, early modern European chroniclers and nineteenth- and twentieth­century historians (Ludwik Kubala, Tadeusz Korzon, and others), impressed by the ostensible power and ferocity of the successor Horde of Crimean Tatars, usually estimated its strength at some 100,000-200,000 warriors. But in the 1930s, one Polish revisionist historian, Olgierd Gorka, challenged such figures. He studied the census figures compiled by the Russian conquerors of the Crimean state and in a tightly argued and highly critical essay concluded that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not more than 250,000 people inhabited the Crimean peninsula. Of these, he believed, only some 180,000-200,000 were actually Tatars, while the remainder were of many other nationalities: Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Karaites, Jews, Turks, and even some Frenchmen. Most of these outsiders lived in Kaffa and the other “larger” cities under direct Ottoman rule. As well, Muslim sources - chroniclers such as Sa'deddin and Rashid Efendi, and correspondence between the sultan in Istanbul and the khan in Bakhchesaray - uniformly speak of very small forces, sometimes as few as 10,000 warriors. Consequently, Gorka concluded that even at the height of its power, the Crimean army had at most 20,000-22,000 warriors.¹⁴ Of course, these estimates reconfigured the Tatar raids and the Black Sea slave trade. For if the number of Tatar marauders was so modest, how could so many Ukrainians and other Slavs been taken as yasir (from Arabic asir/ Tatar yesir: prisoners-of-war/slaves)?

Gorka's revisionist thesis was published in the late 1930s, so the outbreak of war dented its impact.

Indeed, even late in the Communist era, the popular Polish historical synthesizer Leszek Podhorodecki thoroughly rejected Gorka's thesis, arguing that he had ignored the great emigration of Tatars from the Crimea to Turkey before 1778 and had omitted the vassal Nogay and Bujak Tatars from his figures. Podhorodecki estimated the population of the khanate before its decline at 300,000-350,000 and its armed forces at 40,000­50,000.¹⁵ Other students of Crimean history, knowledgeable in Oriental languages but unaware of, or at least less aware of, Gorka's arguments, cite without comment primary sources estimating the Crimean forces as high as 80,000-100,000 warriors.¹⁶

Other historians too thought in terms quite different from Gorka's. Many who studied the devastation inflicted by the Tatars based their accounts on Polish and Ukrainian sources familiar with local conditions rather than on chroniclers' descriptions of the Tatar armies. Thus the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, while agnostic about the size of Mengli Giray's armies, notes that their early-sixteenth-century depredations destroyed almost all of Steppe Ukraine south of the forest line (only cities and fortresses maintained by the state seemed to have retained any population).¹⁷ Similarly, in 1964, the Polish historian Maurycy Horn, who examined the local archives of heavily populated Red Rus' (the Ruthenian province), found that from 1605 to 1633 in this region, far from the Crimean Khanate, at least twenty-six major raids destroyed about half of the towns and villages and reduced the population by 120,000-150,000.

From Horn's figures, fairly well documented down to the village level, it seems that Tatar raids took on average 4,210-5,350 people each year from Red Rus'. If we project - a dicey game - these figures over the two hundred and fifty years of intense Tatar activity, they amount to loss of between 1,051,500 and 1,337,500 people. To this we must add losses in all the other Ukrainian provinces - less heavily populated but more exposed to Tatar attacks - and also a further fifty years of less intense slave raiding. Horn himself was reluctant to estimate total losses beyond his period and region, but other scholars have been less reluctant.

The Polish scholar Bohdan Baranowski wrote prior to the publication of Horn's study and relied entirely on European historians contemporary to events. He guessed that “over the course of the centuries the number of persons taken away as yasir from the territory of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was about a million or perhaps more.”¹⁹ In so far as his estimate dealt with all Ukraine and adjacent areas in ethnic Poland, rather than just Red Rus', his guess seems fairly conservative.

More recently, the Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Dashkevych, who could use Horn's archive-based figures, estimated that “not less than between two and two and a half million people were taken captive and killed” by the Tatars during their two hundred and fifty most active years.²⁰ This figure seems quite high, but breaks down to 10,000 per year and includes both captives and persons killed by the Tatars. Moreover, the Turkish historian Halil Inalcik and the American historian Alan Fisher, who apparently both consulted the same Ottoman archives, agree that in 1578 - the only year for which records have thus far been analysed - at least 17,500 slaves were sold in the Kaffa slave market, the principal emporium selling Ukrainian and other Slavonic captives to Turkey.²¹

This figure accords well with our knowledge of the role of the slave trade in the finances of the Ottoman state, which was taking in 100,000 gold ducats per year from the trade - four gold ducats per sale, thus 25,000 transactions annually.²² Clearly the Black Sea slave trade was a large- scale enterprise, and recent Ukrainian-language surveys of early modern Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar history at least mention it.²³ However, examination of surviving Tatar and Ottoman documents has only just begun, and until this task is completed, no firm total numbers about the yasir from the Slavonic lands north of the Black Sea can be given.